The performance testing tool that IBM offers is Rational Performance Tester. A new feature in the version 9 that came out March 2016 is the Starter Edition. What's special about the Starter Edition is that you don't need to buy a license. This Starter Edition is the special offer: performance testing without license.

Besides the HTTP protocol, Rational Performance Tester also supports other network protocols. You can do performance testing on network traffic from Citrix, SAP, mainframes (TN3270), for example.

Show me your license

With the starter edition, you can develop your performance tests anytime, anywhere, anybody without buying a license. On top of that fact, much of the documentation about the licensed edition also applies to the Starter Edition when we're talking about the features that are available in both editions.

If we're talking about performance testing, we often mean load tests. However, there are also other kinds of tests in the space of performance testing. One tool is better suitable than another tool for the kind of performance testing that you want to do. Here is an incomplete list of performance testing types.

Load testing
You do load testing when you want to know what your application does under a specific load. For example, how would your server respond when 200 users send requests to your application at the same time?

Stress testing
If you want to know under what load your application just stops, stress performance testing is the thing for you to do.

Soak or endurance testing
You want to see what happens when your application suffers a certain load for a long time. A great way to see memory leaks.

Configuration testing
You create tests to see what the influence is of different configurations on your application performance.

From this overview of performance testing types, you can see that you might consider to use the Starter Edition for load test and configuration tests when you want to involve just a few virtual users. If you want to put more load on your application, you can benefit from the cloud capabilities of Rational Performance Tester through the SoftLayer® cloud. The cloud might work for you in terms of timely and easy performance testing.

Starter Edition: try out and find out

The best way to find out whether you can do performance testing with the Starter Edition, is to install the Starter Edition and test. If you are familiar with the installation procedure of IBM products, you might want to skip this chapter. The installation procedure is much the same.

You might encounter an issue where RFT 8.6 fails to recognize the Screenpoints of Html.INPUT.text control launched in Mozilla Firefox web browser

RFT is able to record the actions from the Html.INPUT.text control. Even Test Object Inspector is able to retrieve the properties correctly.

However,during playback, RFT fails to retrieve the screen coordinates of the control and the playback fails with 'No screen point found' error.

Even, Insert Test Object wizard highlights the control in the left hand side top most corner of the page.

We've found that this issue is reproducible only with Mozilla Firefox web browser; but oddly not with Internet Explorer 11. Additionally, we've found this problem to occur while running
RFT 8.6 with Mozilla Firefox 38.

After testing and reproducing this behavior in-house, we've found that to resolve the above issue, you can upgrade RFT to RFT 8.6.0.4 or the higher version.

The recent changes that happened to the server as pointed to us , was that the Database server was accidentally shutdown the day before and post that ,bringing up the Database server and QM application displays this error from RQM Diagnostics.

Note: If the topology is distributed and servers are located in varied timezone than the RQM Web UI user, you should look at the time where the RQM Server and other components are installed to analyse the logs.

IHS logs are huge in size and cannot be opened when IHS is up and running, hence you can copy the logs from IHS install directory and paste it else where to open in a enhanced text editor (Windos notepad has a limitation to open such huge files).

Monitor the server performance and if still continues to display the error, kindly report the error to IBM Middleware Client Support Team with the relevant log entries from each of above log files.

Installing IBM Rational Performance Tester on any Windows flavor is pretty straight forward and it is always suggested that you configure RPT via the IBM Installation Manager. There could be different scenarios under which you in stall the product. We'll talk about a couple of scenarios below:

Installing RPT on a fresh instance of operating system

Upgrading the existing version of RPT

The upgrade part is a simple task as you have to specifically make a pointer to the existing reference of the already installed product files and perform the "Update" operation via IBM Installation Manager.

The fresh installation of the product can be performed in couple of ways.

If the IBM Installation Manager (IM) installer files does not exist then you may manually click on the "launchpad.exe" (RIght click >> Run as Administrator).

Performing point # 2 will first install IM and then account the RPT setup files for installation. There could also be a case where even performing the point # 2 task might result in several errors. Lets discuss a few of them here.

Scenario # 1:

Sometimes a fresh installation of RPT on Windows machine may result in the following error.

To tackle this error, check if there exists any HP applications (like QTP) installed on this machine?
If yes, then probably the JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS: -agentlib:jvmhook might be one such probable cause restricting the IM to install the package files.

Scenario #2:

It could also be a case where despite working on the suggestions mentioned in Scenario # 1, the problem still persists and might also result in additional errors such as:

In such situation, you may either choose one of the below suggestion to get around this problem.

Have you seen the latest video on Rational Performance Tester? The video demonstrates how you can performance test a web application accessed via the Opera Mobile Emulator using IBM Rational Performance Tester. It would also cover the basic configuration required to be set on the Opera Mobile Browser Emulator from IBM Rational Performance Tester perspective. Check it out below!

Three node(triad/redundant) RLKS Licensing server is a fail-over configuration that provide maximum uptime and availability of network licenses. This configuration need three separate machines/nodes located in the same data-center(recommended), running same Operating system(recommended) and same version of License server.

Having above said environment in place, License Administrator need to 'login' in to “Rational License key center” website to generate and download a license file for high availability RLKS environment. Apparently, PRIMARY, SECONDARY and TERTIARY node are decided in the order in which you enroll hostname and host-id data when you generate the license file. Subsequently, System Administrator need to download the license file and deploy(import) the SAME license file on ALL three Licensing server nodes.

Further going ahead, System Administrator has to start ‘License server service’ on ALL three nodes which eventually initiate heartbeat connection between 3-nodes to establish a quorum. what is quorum in Licensing server triad environment?

At least TWO License servers need to establish a connection out of three nodes in order to serve licenses to end-users/clients. Two License servers that form a quorum first, one out of them ACT as a MASTER License server which apparently serves the license keys. In case the MASTER License server goes down, the other two nodes try to establish a quorum between them to serve licenses to end-users/clients.

Now we have a good high level understanding of redundant RLKS License server deployment. Let me give you an overview of “IBM Rational Admin. and Reporting tool” high-level architecture from TRIAD/REDUNDANT RLKS perspective.

In a typical ART deployment scenario, you would have “Rational License key server Administration Agent” component on systems that have License server(RLKS) installed and on another node, an instance of “Rational License key server Administration and Reporting Server” component installed.

When all components of RLKS ART(License servers, ART Admin Agent, ART Admin Server) are installed on respective servers, you would have to login into ART Admin. server web console[https://Hostname:4743/rcladmin/Main.jsp] and add these servers as “redundant” cluster type and pass test connection between Admin and Agent nodes successfully.

Next action is “Start reporting” against each redundant license server node and this step in the background locate Master License server (out of three nodes)and create new log files( lmgrd.log.backup & ibmratl_timestamp.log) only on it.

Let me elaborate this point through an example, lets imagine that PRIMARY has formed a quorum with TERTIARY License server node, because TERTIARY can never be a MASTER License server, PRIMARY License server becomes the MASTER and serves licenses to users/client. When “Start Reporting” feature is started, reporting service create these files(below) ONLY on MASTER License server (here PRIMARY) -

>lmgrd.log.backup

>ibmratl_timestamp.log files

>ibmratl.opt file.

In case of disaster/fail-over (PRIMARY goes down), SECONDARY becomes the MASTER (same set of files created on it). These log files data are crucial to do reporting because ART AGENT reporting service convert these logs data into a RDF data-set that is consumed by ART ADMIN server to get the desired reports.

Here is a unique use case where IBM Rational Performance Tester (RPT) is used to performance test web service calls communicated via MQ (Message Queue) Tunnel connection. In a general scenario, the MQ client runtime makes an HTTP connection to an MQ tunnel servlet at the specified URL (The broker must be configured to access the HTTP tunnel servlet). It can also be a case where the tunneling is established over SSH connection as well.

Overall, it is also recommended that you perform prior checks like:

Check communications

Can you telnet to the MQ host and listener port?

Check access to Queue Manager

a. Use the MQ or JMS API (make sure you capture and display the linked exception when present in the JMSException.

b. Check that the firewall is letting the MQ protocol through

c. Check that communications are open bi-directional

d. Check doing a ping channel

Let's comeback to this specific use case where the topology for the use case was configured in the below fashion:

- MQ was on a remote server and you are not allowed to connect to it directly

- You have to initiate Putty and load the user credentials and connect through Tunnel

- The authentication (RSA) is done through Putty and then the MQ is configured in such a way that the connection establishes once the authentication is done

- The password is valid for that particular session only based on the key file which was generated.

At the initial stage, you could feel that the only blocker that you see with this kind of setup is using a username/password to connect to the MQ manager (this is the password requested by the MQ explorer ). However, from an RPT perspective this is not implemented at the moment into the product ( No basic authentication available ). So, this leaves you with an option of removing this blocker for testing purpose.

However, a MQ connection authentication is required to connect to the queue manager, and this should be removed at the queue manager side (the RPT product does not support this).

Having said that, if you test a local MQ sample with a Putty connection and RPT configured (Remember the connection is established between RPT machine and MQ) RPT should be able to capture the traffic.

All RAD versions come with an IBM Eclipse SDK (IES) and IBM JDK and you do not need to get or use any open source Eclipse download (which would also require its own JDK). It is not recommended to extend an existing Eclipse. Only problems reported with the IES and IBM JDK in provided by default with a RAD installation, are supported.

As of RAD v9.5, extending an existing Eclipse IDE is no longer supported!

It so happens that when you are running the script and you check the 3rd option of HTTP Options tab ("Disable page cache emulation in this test") in RPT, the script is passing. But your project team might want to test the application using cache, which is by emulating the cache. So in such cases you disable the page cache emulation option and notice that some of the pages requests shows failed execution status.

So what could be probable causes in such situations ??

Note, that RPT supports automatically emulating page caching functionality as well. (Because that's what browsers do!).
Under a scripts' HTTP Options there is an option to Turn Off page cache emulation (and also clear cookie cache to emulate a new user visiting the site).

Remember that RPT will record what the browser does. So for example, if you record a script without clearing the recording browser cache, you will have recorded a script that emulates a user with a full browser cache. To emulate users coming to a new site for the first time, or a site where cookies may have expired between visits, or just for ensuring you have a known starting point for your virtual users, ensure you clear your recording browser cache before recording your scripts.

A quick test to understand the difference is to record a script of your application's homepage. Ensure you clear the browser's cache then go to your applications homepage and wait five seconds. Then, select F5 to refresh the page, close the browser. In the script, you will see the first page all the page elements response code is 200. In the second page the page elements will be 304

These HTTP option changes can impact the response times and amount of work the server performs. Usually, it is recommended that you clear the browser cache prior to starting recording so that in the recording the server has to deliver the whole page and you get a 200 and not a 304.

As to what you need the answer would generally be to simulate the realistic behavior of the users. On one hand you can disable cache emulation which would mean that in a loop the server delivers all the page content on every iteration. But if the workload is in a loop simulating a user re-visiting pages you may want cache emulation turned on meaning on subsequent visits to pages the user visited before the server returns 304 because that is what would happen to such a user with a real browser.

In certain circumstances, deselecting the "Disable page cache emulation in this test" option might also result in the response header as :HTTP/1.1 304 RPT Used Cache - No Request Sent

Sometimes, RPT recognizes the request that contains the substitution as part of the cached traffic. Therefore RPT picks up the data from the cache, instead of dynamically rebuilding the request. In such cases, force RPT to dynamically rebuild the request. ie; Disable cache emulation.

The investigation revealed the ETL job run to update the data-warehouse (Dw) was failing:

->Issue happens with any QM reports, or widgets added from QM Dashboard gathering report data from Dw.
->Issue reproducible with anyRQM ProjArea. You can try with JKE Banking Project Area.

You can hence check the following to overcome this Micro report error from the RQM Dashboard:

1. Check data-warehouse (Dw). setup if the ETL is updating the data in the right DB space.
2. If the database space for data-warehouse (Dw). is setup as same as jts tCheck the team server properties for QM or respective application where the error is reported.

A query consists of one or more conditions that must be met by each work item in the result set. Each condition references a work item attribute, an operator and one or more values.

Till date, Queries can only be shared among members of same Project Area, Team Area or with individual users. There is no feature to share the Queries across different IBM Rational team Concert(RTC) Project Area's.

Currently, this only way to share queries across different Project Area's , as different project Area's might have different level of customization (ex: different custom attributes), which might make a query incompatible across different Projects.

Abstract: This article will demonstrate how you can performance test a web application accessed via the Opera Mobile Emulator using IBM Rational Performance Tester. It would also cover the basic configuration required to be set on the Opera Mobile Browser Emulator from IBM Rational Performance Tester perspective. You would also get to know the key parameters which need to be focused on, in order to capture the traffic via RPT's proxy port.

Topology discovery is an exciting integration testing capability included in Rational Test Workbench.

Here are simple steps to explore topology discover of an http resource in Rational Integration Tester (RIT) with Add Number Sample.

Make sure that the RIT http proxy is running, you can check that under agents tab in Rational Test control Panel home page. If it is not listed, start the http proxy.

Browse to installation directory of RIT. Under the “examples” folder, you can find the “addnumbers” and “addnumbersclient” sub folders. Double click on start.bat under “addnumbers”. This will start the AddNumbers Server, click on start service; service will be started as shown below :

Open a command prompt, change the working directory to that of addnumbersclient ,then run the command :

You can see the client started as below and the http traffic now being routed to http proxy.

Start RIT, open the Topology Discovery window under Architecture School Perspective. Select the HTTP option under the RTCP Registered Intercept. Click on start button . Enter the numbers in AddClient application and press “=”, you will get the result in the client. Now when you refresh the view in the RIT , you will the observe the HTTP resource being discovered. Click on the first button under the Observed Resource menu to add the observed resource to system model

There are many scenarios where you might not be able to successfully import Rational Software Architect (RSA) models to Rational Design Manager (DM) using the import engine.

Most of such scenarios occur due to the fact that the import engine might not be configured properly.

Hence it is important that you follow the correct steps to configure RSA DM import engine for the import to work successfully.

Here are the steps you need to follow to configure the import engine.

Configure Import Engine

Launch “Configure Import Engine” from “Start” menu

Input required information into field

NOTE 1 : Real “Jazz User Account” and “Jazz User Password” has to be used

NOTE 2: Make sure you specified a valid path to the Import Engine installation folder in “Eclipse Installation Directory” field.

Click “Test Configuration” button to see if Import Engine can connect to the server. You will see the following message in tray in case of success:

Click “Ok” button to start the Import Engine

Create Import Definition

Make sure you are using an Externally Managed project area. Create a new one if needed

Open project area dashboard

Click “File” and then select “Import Definition” menu item

4. In loaded page select a desired source

Import an entire workspace: you will need to specify the path to RSA workspace that contains projects to be imported.

NOTE: By default all projects from this workspace will be imported to DM server.

Import Engine Name: exactly the same name should be specified as in Configuration Import Engine dialog.

Eclipse Workspace Path: absolute path to RSA workspace on the same machine where Import Engine is launched.

Import Individual Projects: you will need to specify the path to the folder (can be a RSA workspace) that contains project(s) to be imported.

Import Engine Name: exactly the same name should be specified as in Configuration Import Engine dialog.

In section “Projects” click “Add” link:

In section Projects in newly added row in “Workspace Path” specify the path to the folder that contains RSA project

In section Projects in newly added row in “Name of Project to Import” specify the name of RSA project to be imported

5. Click “Save” button

In case of success you will see “Saved Successfully” message box.

Request Import

Click “File” and then select “Request Import” menu item

2. On the loaded page click “Request Import” button

3. You will see the following message box

4. Click “Import Status” link in this message box. “Import Status” page will be loaded. Depending on the model size different stages will be visible on this page. In case of success the status will look like

NOTE: You can see “Completed with Warning” progress instead of “Completed”. You can see the warnings by hovering over “Completed with Warning” link.

NOTE: You can modify model in RSA, save it and then request the import once again. There is no need to create a new import definition. The requested import will update model stored on the server.

NOTE: If you want to delete all imported results, you need to open “Import Definition” page and click “Delete Import Definition and Data” button.

IBM Rational performance Tester offers testers to execute the standalone scripts or wrap these scripts into a schedule and run it for multiple virtual user run executions. For any such executions triggered from RPT, you first need to make the RPT application understand and read Java parameters which should be configured within the 'eclipse.ini' file residing in the RPT install directory.

Generally, The Java Virtual Memory (JVM) heap size for Performance Tester is determined based on the physical memory available on the machine. A percentage of available memory is allocated to the workbench heap (Javaw.exe). If this is not sufficient, you can manually reset the JVM heap size by editing the configuration file ('eclipse.ini'). This file, eclipse.ini, is located in the product install directory (for example, C:\Program Files\IBM\SDP)

NOTE: The heap memory is the memory allocated to the java process by the -xMx parameter whereas the native memory is the memory available to the OS

Now, the question would be ..."How much memory is allocated to the JVM when executing a Test or Schedule in RPT?"

From RPT v8.x and later releases, The playback JVM's maximum heap size when running a Test is set to 1/2 of installed memory (i.e. on a computer with 2 GB of RAM, the heap would be set to 1 GB). For schedule playback, the maximum heap size is set to 3/4 of installed memory. But if you run Schedule using a remote agent controller (for example a new location) you can set a specific memory value using the VMARGS property for the remote agent.

Also note that we do not recommend playing back the schedule scripts on the RPT workbench machine itself, rather suggest to distribute the user load across explicitly deployed RPT Agent machines.
So, when you trigger the scripts, each of the configured RPT Agents gets its share (as configured in the schedule design in RPT) for execution. During this playback course, the RPT Agent machine is solely responsible until it finishes the execution and then transfer the executed data back to RPT (Test Log Data Transfer Stage) for computing the results. Now, the RPT workbench machine should provide enough memory resources required to complete this result computation process